Post navigation

Northside Festival: Music, Film, Art, Entrepreneurship

Yesterday was the first day of Brooklyn’s Northside Festival, which brings together music, film, art, and entrepreneurship. I went mainly for the entrepreneurship panels, and I learned a lot of technology and gamification.

I caught the tail end of the Algorithms! Doing Data Science on your website panel. Basically, you’ll want a good data scientist, and the UI (user interface) will go with the algorithm. They also touched on gamification. One of the best gaming elements to include on a site is a leaderboard. By having visible points, people get competitive. Status can still have a big effect on people, the panelists said. Other ways to gamify a site are to give preferred members first dibs on bids, add badges, and compare scores to peers. To figure out what’s best for your site, you want to first figure out what player or user behavior you want to encourage.

Nick started the conversation by comparing the gamification of everything to music. He said that the world has been musicified, meaning there is music everywhere, and that advertising has been musicified. But, music is designed differently for different purposes. This means that we think of songs on the radio differently from songs in an advertisement.

So is the gamification of everything possible?

Yes, Nick said. But there will be a large gap between that and an actual game. Games have certain experiences and aesthetics. Most games, for example, have a lack of stakes. “I don’t want my checking account to be a game,” he said.

He cited the HuffPo has a bad example of gamification, explaining that they basically added badges and threw some surface game elements on to the site. Good game design means creating certain games and feedback that are useful. Games teach us what motivates us, and uses structures of feedback and constraint to gage interaction, he said.

Ben approached the topic a little differently. He decided to make a game out of it. First he asked everyone in the room who was born in June to raise their hand. Then he picked three of those people and told them to each come up with one question to ask him and Nick. He compared the time it took them to think of the questions as the loading time of a game.

Once the questions were ready, Ben and Nick had to answer the questions in the least amount of words as possible. Whoever was more concise won (best two out of three games). They played odds and evens to see who went first. WordPress won’t let me embed the video, but you can watch part of the game here.

In the end, Nick and Ben each won a round, and then Ben ended the game, claiming it was more fun that way. He went on to explain that the lighter the game, the better, and that good games are playful and give people choices.

Some other takeaways about gamification:

It’s fun to get rewards for each step

You want to make people who are already on a site more committed (consider themselves users and be more engaged)